Entertainment

My Facebook Story: An Inside Look at Facebook's First Privacy Fiasco

On September 5, 2006, I used Facebook's own platform to rock its foundations and create a revolt that would make international headlines. Since Facebook has asked its users to share their stories in celebration of passing the 500 million user mark, I thought that I would share mine here.

It was the start of my junior year at Northwestern University. Classes hadn't started yet, but I was on campus several weeks early for my training as a residential and community assistant. The dorms were empty, except for the athletes and the other community assistants (CAs).

I woke up that Tuesday in my sparse and still-undecorated dorm room. The first thing I did — as many young people still do — was to check Facebook. Back then, it was very primitive; you had your profile, your friends profiles, wall posts and private messaging. You had to actively visit friends' profiles to learn anything new about them.

When I first saw News Feed, I didn't like it. In fact, I hated it, so I decided to let people know. After instant messaging with some friends who felt the same way, I decided to create a Facebook group called "Students Against Facebook News Feed (Official Petition to Facebook)." In fact, the group still exists and I'm still its admin.

I quickly whipped together an image in Photoshop, wrote up some text, IMed the link to some friends, asked them to share the group and rushed out the door for my community assistant training. I could never have anticipated what that group would become.

Students Against Facebook News Feed Goes Viral

I didn't have access to a computer until lunchtime that day, but I already knew the group was gaining steam. I was eager to log on and see for myself what was happening.

In less than six hours, the group had amassed 13,000 members. In other words, it had gone viral and the irony was that it was thanks to Facebook's new News Feed. I periodically checked Facebook after that as membership continued to swell. My fellow community assistants were asking about what was going on, with most of them supporting my position. Later that night, several of us were actually standing in front of my laptop, constantly clicking "refresh."

At almost exactly 2:00 a.m. CT, the group reached 100,000 members. That's when I finally called it a night.

For the next few days, the protest continued to gain momentum. Media outlets started e-mailing and calling me, filling up my inbox and disrupting my CA training (Time was the first to contact me). The group now had more than 250,000 members and I was getting hundreds of messages, friend requests and wall posts. It was all rather overwhelming.

During the course of that week, I continued to post updates on Students Against Facebook News Feed, linking to the media coverage and refining our message. We didn't ask Facebook to remove News Feed — instead, we wanted the company to add far stronger privacy features so that we didn't have to automatically share our break-ups or new photos if we didn't want to.

Facebook Makes Its Move

Thursday, September 7, was the culmination of the Facebook News Feed fiacso. That day, the group broke 750,000 members — nearly 10% of Facebook's entire userbase (it had 9.3 million members at the time). The Today Show asked me to come on the air the next day to talk about Facebook and privacy. All the while, I was completing my training as a CA during a beautiful Chicago summer.

"We really messed this one up. When we launched News Feed and Mini-Feed we were trying to provide you with a stream of information about your social world. Instead, we did a bad job of explaining what the new features were and an even worse job of giving you control of them. I'd like to try to correct those errors now."

It was a very honest letter. He apologized for not building in proper privacy controls and said that the team was coding "nonstop" to implement better ones — something that they delivered on just a few days later.

The letter was exactly what I wanted and it quickly put the entire protest to a screeching halt. I soon declared victory on "Students Against Facebook News Feed" and declared that the group's purpose was fulfilled. The group's growth immediately stopped, media inquiries quickly disappeared and I never ended up on The Today Show, as the story was now dead.

The Power of Facebook

A week after I launched Students Against Facebook News Feed, I received a direct e-mail from Mark Zuckerberg. In fact, I still have the e-mail thread. While I won't share our exchanges, Zuckerberg essentially wanted to get my take on the events of the past week and my suggestions for what the company should do for releasing new products going forward. I was thrilled by the gesture. Even now, Zuckerberg likes to bring up our little history.

I ended up with a little notoriety on campuses nationwide, at least for a while. The occasional student newspaper would ask for an interview, and I ended up with more than 2,000 friend requests and just as many Facebook messages. Still, it was just one incident in Facebook's history; the social network continued to expand, I went on to graduate from Northwestern and the world continued to spin.

I'm still in awe of just how important Facebook was to my life back then and to the lives of all 9.3 million college students using it at the time. If the protest demonstrated anything, it was that the social network already had a special place in our lives.

Now that 500 million people use Facebook on a regular basis — more than the entire population of the U.S., Mexico and Canada combined. Now we have millions of examples of Facebook bringing families together and tearing couples apart. Facebook knows this, which is why it launched the Facebook Stories campaign in the first place.

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